Boston's Alternative Source! image!
   
Feedback

[Urban Eye]

The war at home
Gunfire shatters a South End night

BY CHRIS WRIGHT

LAST WEEK — ABOUT 2:30 on a Thursday morning — I was awakened by a the sound of gunfire outside my bedroom window.

Bang! Bang! Bang! ... Bang! Bang!

"I thought it was fireworks." You hear this sort of thing all the time. "I thought it was a car backfiring." Nonsense. Gunfire has a very specific sound: short, sharp, and extremely loud. There were about five shots, a piercing staccato: Bang! Bang! Bang! ... Bang! Bang! And then voices — angry, incomprehensible shouts — and then silence. I jumped up to look out of the window and saw a man running down the road. The shooter, I thought. The perp.

As I gazed out my window — weak-kneed, bleary from sleep — I noticed a man pacing back and forth in the gloom. Every now and then he would climb the steps of a stoop, then turn and walk back down again. He did this for three or four minutes. Or maybe 10. Or maybe 30 seconds. Time tends to be a bit wobbly at such moments. In any case, the man kept on pacing until a battalion of police cars arrived — lights flashing, radios crackling — and then he disappeared.

I have been a resident of the South End for a little over a month. I live on the corner of Union Park and Tremont Street. It’s a lovely spot — lots of trees, red-brick buildings, decorative ironwork, a park cutting through the center of the street. The surrounding area is flush with restaurants, coffee shops, bars. And there seems to be a real sense of community here. You will see the locals on Sunday mornings, raking leaves, picking up trash. There are fliers posted in doorways advertising little neighborhood soirees.

Ten years ago, the South End was a dangerous place to live. Though gentrification was already in full swing, the streets were rife with drugs, gangs, and violent crime. But that was then. Today, the area is affluent, trendy, and largely free of the violence that plagued it in the early ’90s. Or is it? There are, according to some, signs that gang activity in the South End may be on the rise once more.

"We have it in the paper this week that a kid got shot on Yarmouth Street, the fourth shooting this year," says Franklin Tucker, editor of the South End News. "On the corner of Mass Ave and Washington there’s the return of the Hornets, an old-time South End gang — the ones who wear Charlotte Hornets gear. The older members, arrested in the early ’90s, are getting out of prison. Then there are the young bucks. This is just waiting to explode."

Whether or not violent explosions become part of day-to-day South End life, last Thursday felt like a bad night in Mazar-e-Sharif. After the shooting, the police bore down on Union Park like an invading army. They came in squad cars and on foot, their guns drawn. "Don’t fucking move!!! Don’t fucking move!!!" This was a police officer, addressing someone who was crouching in the shadows. "If you move I will SHOOT you!!!" There were a few moments of silence, then: "Get the fuck up! Get the FUCK UP!!!"

The trouble, I later discovered, had started around the corner from me, at Clarendon and Columbus, near the Hard Rock CafŽ. It was about 2:15 a.m. A concert featuring a Puerto Rican rapper named Fat Joe had just ended. As kids milled about outside the club, a few scuffles broke out. Shots were fired. A young man fell to the ground.

"The victim was a 28-year-old Dorchester male," says Cliff Connolly, a spokesman for the Boston Police Department. "He was shot twice in the back. He was taken to the Boston Medical Center, where he is listed in critical but stable condition." There were, Connolly continues, "two possible suspects, two perpetrators: one black Hispanic male in his late 20s, approximately five feet 10 inches, stocky, dark hair, a hooded sweatshirt, black leather jacket." Details on the other suspect remain sketchy.

According to Tucker — "and this is all speculation" — the man who was shot in the back may not have been the target of the assault. He may have been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Or he may have been hanging out with the wrong people. In any case, two young men for whom the bullets were reportedly intended took off running — as one tends to do in such situations — in the direction of Union Park. The assailants gave chase. Bang! Bang! Bang! ... Bang! Bang!

"We received calls that shots were fired at Tremont and Union Park," says Connolly. "The suspects who were involved in the shooting did flee in that general direction. As of right now we don’t have any victims down there."

It’s awful, of course, to be awakened by gunfire in the wee hours, but it’s another thing entirely to be running for your life, knowing that you are the target of that gunfire, to be aware that a slug could rip into your back at any moment, splintering your spine, perhaps, or tearing into your lungs, filling your chest cavity with blood, tearing the top of your head clean away. It appears that the kids who fled down my street were lucky. But their ordeal didn’t end when their assailants gave up the chase.

"If you move I will SHOOT you!!!"

The "word on the street," says Tucker, is that this rather stern admonition was aimed at the targets of the initial gunfire, who were found by the cops cowering in a doorway. "These kids had been shot at," Tucker says. "They were running away." The real villains, meanwhile, were nowhere to be found.

After the police cars left Union, a handful of cops stayed behind to scour for evidence. One of them had the unenviable task of searching the park in the middle of the road. He was pushing leaves around with his toe. "What kind of casings are we looking for?" he said. It was cold, dark, and the officer’s voice had a grumbly tone.

As I watched the unhappy cop pushing those leaves about, I was reminded of an incident that occurred when I was a kid — six or seven years old. A boy named Femi had fallen down in the playground. He blubbered. There was blood on his knee. I followed Femi into the nurse’s office, more fascinated than concerned, and heard her say, "He’s lost a bit of skin." I spent the rest of the day involved in a fruitless search for that little patch of Femi’s knee.

God knows how, but it turns out that ballistic evidence was eventually recovered from my street that night. Peace of mind, like lost skin, may prove harder to come by.

Issue Date: December 13 - 20, 2001

Back to the News and Features table of contents.